Phusion has released version 4.0 beta 1 of Passenger. It now allows multiple Ruby versions on one Passenger instance. For example, you could run a 1.8.7 app and a 1.9.3 app at the same time. There’s also evented I/O, real-time response buffering, and a slew of other performance improvements which they cover in the release notes.

Not every Ruby user needs to write their own TCP servers and clients from scratch. If you do, though, you’ll appreciate the screencast Jesse Storimer just released. He uses the Ruby Sockets library, and he writes a simple server in just 3 lines of code.

Then Jesse goes even further by hand-coding replacements for the Sockets library methods. It shows you exactly how much pain Ruby is saving you with the high-level API. Along the way you learn what the library is doing under the hood, and what parts you might replace when the defaults aren’t what you want.

Igor Alexandrov wrote us an email yesterday to let us know about Metrika, a Ruby wrapper for the Yandex Metrika API. Apparently, Yandex... which I’ve never heard of... runs the most popular search engine in Russia, and Metrika appears to be their version of Google Analytics, with a bunch of additional features.

With the Ruby wrapper, you can very easily create, view, and delete any sort of webpage counters, goals, or filters.. and get all sorts of statistics on your traffic.

Sam Rawlins recently was awarded the Ruby Association’s 2012 Grant to help fund his work on Creosote, a mathematics package for Ruby... Sam reached out to us recently to let us know about a blog post he just wrote entitled “Checklist for the Benevolent Open Source Maintainer”.

He covers the obvious stuff like documentation, a Readme, and a good test suite. But he also brings up stuff you might forget, like setting up screencasts, an irc channel, or a mailing list.

Lastly, over here at Code School, we recently released Ruby Bits Part 2. This course picks up where RubyBits 1 leaves off, and covers even more advanced Bits of Ruby, such as Blocks, Procs, Lambdas, Dynamic Classes and Methods, Missing Methods, and in the last two chapters we create a DSL together.

If you’re not yet comfortable with Ruby metaprogramming, this is probably the most fun way to learn. And the first level is free if you want to just give it a try. Just head over to CodeSchool.com to give it a whirl.

Previous Episodes

A bunch of big project releases this week from JRuby, Redis, Git, and more. We also point you to a few useful gems like Sassquatch and Literate Randomizer, look at a teardown of the Rumble projects, and show you how your website can be a proud hipster on this edition of Ruby5.

Today's Ruby5 brings you joy in the form of six expertly crafted stories about a new Ruby patch release, some mobile development how-to's, tips on healthy Rails projects and better specs, how to share staging like a grown-up, and a tour of Rails 4 features.